University Place

Pleased to introduce Martha Laugen as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. The opinions expressed today are those of the presenters and not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Martha Laugen has been the city manager at Madison Speed Cycle since December 2014. She has also worked in a local bicycle advocacy since 2011 and has managed a multi-site obesity treatment program.

Martha also enjoys riding her bike recreation for commuting and for recreation. Here today to discuss the lineage and future of bike sharing in Madison and green bikes, in red bikes, green transportation, please join me in welcoming Martha Laugen.

Applause

Thank you very much Emily and thank you to all for coming out this afternoon, I appreciate it. So red bikes and green transportation. Oh, all my fonts changed. We're going to roll with it, we're flexible

laughter

. We're going to look at a brief history of bikes here in Madison and beyond. First I wanted to give a couple disclaimers. Emily covered the bases really well.

I work as a city manager for Madison B-Cycle, it's the local bike-share system here in town and so I have by no means a broad-based-- I'm biased let's just leave it at that. I'm biased towards the Madison B-Cycle systems, but of course bike sharing didn't start with B-Cycle, so we're going to look at all kinds of different things. Also, I'm not a historian by training and education. I'm a program manager, an athletic coach, and a personal trainer.

So if we'd all like to do some group stretches at the end that's in my comfort zone. This not quite as much but again we're going to roll with it. I want to give a couple acknowledgments before I really get rolling. To the Wisconsin Historical Museum, thank you so much for having me this afternoon.

I really appreciate it. To Bob Burns and Lee Jones who work with B-Cycle LLC and really started the B-Cycle bike sharing system as part of Trek bicycles, to Claire Hurley and Christa Crum who have helped me get familiar with my role with Madison B-Cycle, to Roger Charlie with Budget Bicycles who is really an innovator and trailblazer in bike sharing here in town, Julian Corbett and Arthur Ross who are as well, to DMI Downtown Madison Incorporated, as well as the Downtown Madison Business Improvement District. Without their help we probably wouldn't be able to have the impact in bicycling infrastructure that we all enjoy in Madison today, and to everybody who rides a B-Cycle, one of the red bikes or a bicycle of any sort, so hopefully that's all of you as well, thanks. So what will we cover today?

We will look at bike sharing here and now. What we tend to think of when we see bike sharing in the City of Madison. We'll look at bike-shares' routes. We will look at the bike-share evolution or revolution.

How bike sharing has evolved over the generations. We'll see what lessons we can distill from those historical roots. We'll look at the Madison version or versions of bike sharing. Again, I'm a little biased.

And we'll talk about some secrets to success both for bike sharing in the City of Madison and around the state, around the country, around the world. We'll take a brief peek at the end into the future as well. So the here and now, how many of you have heard of Madison B-Cycle or bike sharing? Most of us are fairly familiar with the term.

How many of you have ridden a bike-share bike before? A couple, a little bit less, but that's okay, the day is young. So Madison B-Cycle or bike sharing around the City of Madison, we usually see it as the red bikes. People are familiar with seeing red bikes in clusters or one at a time around town.

B-Cycle and bike sharing bikes have often been called the magic bike. The theory there is that it's a bike that appears magically when you need it and disappears when you don't. We talk about transportation transformation and the title of my presentation talks about green transportation, really looking at ways to link together shorter trips, to cover that last mile in our daily commutes from cities of all sizes, to get recreational riding in and to get us just from A to B. We talk about sharing, it's a new concept that is kind of gaining some trending popularity with not just bicycles, but all

kinds of things

farming local foods, tools, equipment, library books, you name it. People often think of, excuse me, people often think of bike sharing as bike rental and it is that kind of, but not really. And then the question I always get when I tell people I work for Madison B-Cycle is, "Hey do those things ever get stolen?" We'll talk about that in a little bit. So again, I don't mean to present an exhaustive historical timeline of bike sharing, but a couple punctual points across the years will give you little bit of a picture of how it's developed.

So I'm sure there's thousands of different map points that you could insert here from different cities, from different types of systems, but I'll give you a little sample here today. So if we look back to the 60s, 1965, in Amsterdam, the white bicycle plan was launched and it was a very politically motivated kind of movement to get free bicycles out into the community for anybody to use. I'll talk a little bit more about it later. Oops, 1974, I will attempt most languages except for French, but it's the yellow bikes in La Rochelle, France.

A time the yellow bike system launching in around 1974. Skipping a little bit to 1991, we see in Scandinavia some bike- share systems start to pop up, Copenhagen and in smaller cities in Denmark and they've probably in Denmark been fairly dedicated compared to some other cities that are really trying to refine a system that works and works over the long-term. In 1993, we see the green bike scheme in Cambridge, UK, again looking at getting bikes in the hands of people, but particularly in a university-town-kind of structure. 1994, we start to cover some American history with the yellow bike project in Portland, Oregon.

We bring it home to Madison around 1996, with the launch of the red bike project in Madison. 2010 sees the start of a B-Cycle system in Denver, Colorado, and that was concurrent to the launch of Minneapolis's nice right system. An interesting bit of history there, both systems were launched after a pilot program was run in each city concurrent with the Democratic and Republican national conventions hosted in each city that year. It was a pilot program with bike -share that kind of grew some roots and traction in each city and so that led to the implementation of a larger bike-share.

2011 of course is when Madison B-Cycle launched, so the history of Madison bike-share really starts to evolve and take shape. And then 2015, we've seen the launch of a program called SoBi, bikes in Hamilton, Ontario. Now as we look across this timeline, you can start to classify the different systems into what we call generations of bike-share, and basically it's just some subtle and major differences between how the bike-share system works. You can see across time that generations don't necessarily evolve chronologically in a pure sense.

You'll see some Generation 1s sprinkled in with Generation 2. I'll talk a little bit about how the red bike project in Madison is kind of a Generation 1 and 2 system. So what does that mean? Well let's take a peek, generation by generation.

So Generation 1 is basically taking a bunch of bikes, putting them in a target area for people to use. The theory there being that everyone should have access to a bike to get around town, to make short trips linked together. They should be open access, easy to find and easy to drop off when you're done using them. So that's akin to the white bike project in Amsterdam which you'll find pictured here.

The theory there is that you ride a bike, you leave a bike when you're done, they aren't locked up, it's not a problem and there's open management and maintenance of the bikes in the system. So we see examples here in our timeline, white bike plan all the way up to the initial launch of the red bike project in Madison, several Generation 1 type systems. So how did that really work in its implementation? Well, as per the theory, it puts bikes all across the target area scattered about for open use and in a lot of cases when this was launched very shortly thereafter lots of bikes disappeared.

They were victims of theft or extended borrowing if you will. We're not really sure. And furthermore excuse me, lots of bikes were vandalized or broken or just poorly maintained over time. So between launch and a very short time after launch, most of these Generation 1 systems have been left with a fraction of the bikes they started with and perhaps even a small fraction of functional bikes from there.

If we look at Generation 2 and we can see pictures here in front of the Madison Capitol, this is from the red bike project launch here in Madison. Generation 2 thinks more along the theory of "okay, well, we need people to have some kind of buy-in to the bike-share so that the bikes aren't just going to roll away never to be seen again. So it starts to look at a coin or token deposit system where somebody puts down a deposit in order to get the bike to use and it needs to be something that's reasonable, that people had easily like a coin. European cultures use coin money a lot more than we do in the US, so it's very easy to have larger denominations in coin.

They trade those in and they receive the coin or token back when they return the bike. Generation 2 systems also lent themselves to facilitating some corporate sponsorship or even ad placement on the bikes themselves or underwriting the system as a whole. And then they really kind of vary in terms of maintenance, whether somebody is dedicated to look at the bikes in the fleet and give them regular or troubleshooting maintenance or perhaps it's just more open-ended. So with Generation 2, we see systems like some of the early systems in Denmark, as well as the initial red bike project here in Madison.

Again, the way it purports to work is to cluster bikes around some hubs, somebody gives their deposit to get a bike, they return it to the same hub to receive the deposit back. So what has happened historically with generation 2 systems, unfortunately a lot of the same thing that we saw in generation 1. Bikes go out into the target community, people think, "Well I gave a euro, I got a new bike", and the bike might disappear. And we do also see some share of vandalism or if at the very least, poor maintenance on a routine basis with the bikes in those fleets.

This then either correlates to or perhaps leads to a little bit of question marks about sponsors and advertisers because if the fleet isn't well-maintained and predictable as to where the bikes are and whether they'll stay in the system, it's harder to get larger businesses to invest their time and money into underwriting the system. If we look at generation 3 bike-sharing systems we start to see a little bit of a more secure station-based bike array. The bikes are accessed by some sort of account system or membership. They tend to use some version of smart technology in combination or one at a time, using things like RFID cards that can help you check bikes out and show you where bikes are in the system, GPS, smart phone applications, and membership profiles that are accessed either by smart phone or online.

Station and bike maintenance, because it's a station-based system, it's a lot easier to organize maintenance on a routine basis. Same story by using smart technology. Now systems can start to track where their bikes are in the system and perhaps even schedule them for routine maintenance using some of that technology. The bikes are adjustable, they're meant to fit multiple types of riders in multiple conditions and again, there's that big potential for sponsorship underwriting or ad placement either with on the system, excuse me, either within the system on stations or on the bicycles themselves.

So generation 3 systems, we see the Denver B-Cycle station, the first B-Cycle system in the US, Minneapolis Nice Ride and of course, Madison B-Cycle in 2011 launched as a generation 3 system. So again, how does this purport to work, bikes are based at a station, but they are free to move around the system as they need to, in and out of a particular station, it doesn't have to go back to the station that it started from? And to balance the distribution of bikes throughout the system, as well as to troubleshoot maintenance concerns there's usually a vehicle or a fleet of vehicles that do some backup support to help keep the system in operation. Let me jump to Generation 4.

Generation 4 could be called the social bikes. Social moving and shaking a little bit more openly throughout the community. These bikes are arranged in an open array with a certain lockup, so you'll start to see some roots back here to the

initial theory of

"Hey, there should be bikes everywhere for people to ride." Social bikes starts to get out that arrangement. The theory is that they can be taken from anywhere and left anywhere when the rider is done. Again, like Generation 3, the access is by an account or membership system and also like Generation 3, they use smart technology, either GPS, phone applications, member profiles, online or access codes and like several Generations 2 through 4, they have some sponsorship and ad potential on the bicycles. So Generation 4, again it's bikes throughout the target community placed in multiple and variable locations and the bikes can kind of ping you and talk to you to tell you where they are, so that you can find one when you need it.

So some of the lessons that we learned from history. It looks like from Generation 1 and Generation 2, I would kind of-- might get the idea I would throw them under the bus, the metaphorical bus, as systems that didn't really work. But that's not exactly true. It was important to try those experiments socially, and in terms of just bicycling use, to see what lessons could be distilled and refined into other systems.

And like we saw it's not necessarily a chronological movement. There are different reasons for different generations of systems in a community to serve their needs. So the biggest issue was probably security. In our Generation 1 and 2, we saw bicycles go into the system and immediately disappear.

Some solutions to that, that are simplified, are to begin to integrate security into the design of the bike and the system itself. So you'll see the B-Cycle bike like I have here on the stage and in the picture, not exactly the most streamlined, lightweight thing to steal. And if you did, and rode it around, I would probably know Zack in the back there, "Hey you're not riding your own bike! This is a Madison B-Cycle bike." They are also hard to strip down for parts to redistribute.

They just have a very distinct look, weight and feel to them that discourages theft. In addition, some of the station lockups or the hubs where you find the bike, as we see those evolve and get more sophisticated, the propensity or the temptation around theft tends to decrease. Technology lessons that we learned from technology, constant innovation. The theory of bike-share is so wonderful because it just simply puts bikes at the access of people and bikes are fairly simple machines as we think about them, however as we look at technological innovations throughout the generations, we see that things can in theory become even more easy to use and more accessible to more people.

Maintenance, the initial bike- share station is part of what might have turned people off to less successful systems is that the bikes just don't work like they're supposed to and that can be all the way down to, "Well this bike has a flat tire or somebody drove this one into the lake and now it's covered with algae"... all the way up to a big launch of a system in a new community. One of the things that we really emphasize at B-Cycle is that if we give a launch date for a system in a new city, the first person who scans their card at that station, if the bike doesn't release the way that it's supposed to, "What's the motivation to ride." So really making sure that maintenance is there, not just in the bicycles themselves, but in the whole way that the system is supposed to function. Also making sure that things are well-funded in a sustainable way.

Again bicycling is a rather simple machine. It doesn't have to be terribly complicated, but to keep things working well and sustained in a community there does need to be some financial backing. I would wager, this is my opinion, that one of the lessons to draw from history is a sense of community pride or fostering a sense of care for the community bikes as well. Bikes that are pumped into a community without a lot of notice or that just don't have a meaningful place in the community, it's a little bit harder for those systems to survive.

On the flipside of that coin what we find with Madison B-Cycle is, because of the distinct look of our bikes in our system, we basically have a five-person staff at our office here, but a 250,000 people who are kind of deputized as caretakers of the system. We'll receive phone calls about bikes left in potentially questionable places to help us go retrieve them in case they were left there unintentionally. People kind of look after the system and the bikes themselves because we've created a brand and a relevance within the community and I think that helps for longevity too. And also access, again the pure theory of bike-share is just this wonderful sense of access.

bikes for everybody to use at any time, but access is not just a simple matter of getting bikes out there. We saw from the generations that they can disappear as quickly as they appear. And one of our current challenges now with newer generations of bike-share is to ensure not only that there are enough bikes for people to use, but that the financial and technological systems in place to access memberships and accounts are really accessible to most people in the community. And once you make membership accessible to everybody you have to be sure you're creating a culture where people will make that choice to go by bike instead of other modes of transportation.

So access and equity are just not things that you can kind of sit back and say we created it and let it go. It needs to be a constant effort to maintain. So the versions of bike-share in Madison, we've got Madison B-Cycle and the Red Bike Project. The Red Bike Project really kind of grew roots from a tradition on State Street of a bike repair person who would tune up bikes that had been abandoned, whitewash them and kind of turn them loose to citizens to use on their own and return when they were done.

Roger Charlie from Budget Bicycles kind of clued into this to the mid-90s and thought we should really do this on a larger scale, and again, make it more accessible to more people. So working in collaboration with several folks who had been part of bicycle culture in other major cities, as well as here in Madison, they launched the Red Bike Project in May of 1996. May is significant because it's bike month. You'll see a lot of things roll out during May and a lot of awareness around getting on your bike.

It's usually a wonderful time in Wisconsin to start to ride. Maybe not as much this year, but that's Wisconsin. And they were an open array, so kind of like that Generation 1 bike-share where the bikes are just out there, you find one, you use it, you leave it when you're done. Around 2000 the Red Bike Project did transition to more of a library checkout or Generation 2 type of bike-share system.

Basically you can go and leave a credit card account number with red bikes. You'll get a bike and a lock so that it becomes more your responsibility to take care of and then you can take that bike in for regular maintenance, as well as return it when you're done and you're good with your account on your credit card. Looking at Madison B-Cycle, again the first B-Cycle system, so a bike-share system usually consists of in Generations 3 and beyond, the bikes, potentially the stations and the software that kind of coordinates them. So Denver was our first B-Cycle city, but Madison was shortly thereafter in 2011.

We launched in a five-year partnership with the City of Madison and so as our own entity with the stations that we have across town would not have been possible without our partnership with the city. That began in 2011, so at the end of 2015, we will be in a renewed agreement with the city. Trek Bicycles provided $1.4 million in terms of capital costs to get 35 originally, 35 stations installed and 350 bike built up and get ready for implementation into the system. The city at our launch, and currently, provides integral support by allowing stations to be placed on public right-of-ways.

We worked with the city to tweak the signage ordinances in the City of Madison, so that on station signage and wayfinding maps will be both helpful to riders and compliant with local laws. And we really have to thank Kevin Briski who was formally with Madison Parks for expediting the permit process to get these things done initially. Our first set of stations included sites that were selected in partnership with local leaders throughout the community and also with the City of Madison. We also based that initial siting on some of the more conventional wisdom about bike- share station placement which I'll talk about in a moment.

And currently the operations are run by Madison B-Cycle which is a subsidiary of Trek. The operating costs are covered in part by member revenues, as well as sponsorship and advertising. You can see the bike that I brought with me here is kind of Trek-branded bike. We do have several sponsored stations throughout the community and you can see their name and acknowledgment of the

sponsors through town

University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW Credit Union, UW Health, Hilldale Shopping Center. And what's wonderful is that with the bikes, they get mobile billboards to circulate all around town that are branded with our sponsor identity as well. So the bike itself, again you can see it's a little heftier than your Trek Madone racing bike, but that's not what it's for. So it's constructed to be sturdy and weatherproof because it does live outside most of the time and it's meant to fit several types of riders.

So there's a step-through frame, adjustable seat, internal hub so you three speeds without having to worry about the chain or gears grinding, chain and coat guard so that whether you are in a three-piece suit or your Saturday cargo shorts and T-shirt, you can get around on the bike easily. There's a cargo basket which gives us not only carrying capacity but advertising potential, and hub- generated lights so that your riding safe after dark. There's also an onboard key so that if you find yourself somewhere where there's not a station you can lock the bike temporarily. The station has become a well-defined place, it's secure, they're relatively unobtrusive.

We've made it our commitment with Madison B-Cycle not to displace existing bicycle parking by installing new stations because we don't want to usurp bicycling around town. We just want to augment it. They're innovative, constantly using technology and opportunistic. They've started to become a little bit of locations of their own.

You can meet your friend at the Hamilton and Main B-Cycle station to start your coffee shop run. If we look at our trips over our existence from 2011 to 2014, we can see pretty explosive growth in trip numbers. Our 2011 line, a little bit shorter, because we weren't open a full season of operations that first year. But you can see trips have really grown quite a bit and obviously peaking at that time of the summer when weather conditions are most ideal to get on that bike for any kind of reason.

A couple numbers of note, following that table, we cleared over 100,000 trips in 2014, over just 266 days of operations. That was a real landmark for us. In 2011, we were not open for the full season, but we only had about 18,000 trips, so obviously it's caught on. In 2014, we had over 2,600 annual members.

They're not our only riders, to be sure. We also have casual users who walk up to the kiosk, check out a bike maybe once or twice, but annual members do make the most trips using the system. So while they might be smaller in number than walk-up customers, they do make the most trips. And if you will permit me I will direct your attention to the back of the room where one of our top trip takers is sitting.

Stu is in the back row there. Hi, Stu. Stu had the dubious and honorary distinction of having a B-Cycle named after him, so you will see somewhere circulating in the fleet the Stu bike, so where you see Trek on this bike you'll see Stu's name and a big crown because he ruled our season. In what year was it Stu?

2013. 2013, thank you. Collectively in 2014, all of our riders burned over 16.5 million calories. So if you're wondering, you know, you want to go get that burger, that brat, those cheese curds, if you B-Cycle there, hey it's almost like you're not taking in any of the calories.

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sponsors through town

We also in 2014 expanded from 35 to 39 stations to better serve the community. We average about 315 bikes in circulation. We have 350 in our fleet, but we don't want to fill up all the docks. We're always sensitive to the demands on the system and so that number is very fluid, it kind of goes up and down according to demand.

The geography of Madison does provide me with the challenge of the more stations we get, the smaller the map gets, so we can take a closer look at this on my computer screen if you need to afterwards. But here's a look at our entire station array throughout the City of Madison. As you can see, we really fit densely in areas where lots of people are coming and going with multiple modes of transportation. In other words, downtown, in the campus area, that's where we see pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, bus riders, altogether and that tells us that's a great place to start to locate a collection of stations.

Obviously you'll see that there's neighborhoods without B-Stations, we want to change that over the next five years, but we have to do it in a way that makes sense. If we only put stations at the very far reaches of the community, it doesn't make sense to link those short trips together. Community engagement, again to foster that sense of ambassadorship or care for the bike-share system, Madison B-Cycle does involve itself in 75 to 100 community events throughout the year and those are very bicycle centric events, like Bike-to-Work week, which is now called Wisconsin Bike Week. Free promotions and co-promotions with the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation, but also things that are less bicycle oriented.

If you ride a B-Cycle to a Badger home football game and park with us instead of worrying about parking your car, not only will you get quicker access to Camp Randall, you'll get a free brat. So we really want to engage with the community and again, make it relevant and meaningful to hop on that bike and again with 16.5 million calories burned, you can have two brats.

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So what are secrets to a successful bike-share system? Well according to the Institute for Transportation and Development, there's a couple major guidelines. Quality bikes, bikes that are well-maintained and theft proof. Do we have that here at Madison?

Absolutely. Ease of use, ways to check out the bike, pay and manage your account, that are easy to understand and easy to facilitate and we definitely have that with Madison B-Cycle as well. Also meaningful especially as we get beyond the Generation 2 bike-share systems, is some real-time info and in fact, if you with your smart phone open up the B-Cycle Now app you will see every station that's close to you here at the museum. It will pop right open to a map and you'll also see a real-time read of how many bikes and docks are available at that station.

So you know before you make your trip that there's a bike ready for you at your station. You can also check your destination to make sure that there's a place to park it. System expanse, covering at least 10 square kilometers, we do have that in Madison. Bikes per resident, the recommendation is about 10 bikes per thousand residents.

We're not quite there in Madison, but again we don't want to fill up the stations with a bunch of bikes so that it leaves no docks open. So we do keep that bike volume within the system rising and falling with the ebb and flow of usage. And station density, 10 to 16 stations per square kilometer. You can see by our map that we're not quite there either.

So not only do we need to expand into different corners of Madison, but we also need to increase density. It's a little bit like I remember I used to work in New York City and at the time there was a rumor that Starbucks said they never wanted anyone to have to walk more than a block in New York City to get a Starbucks coffee. It's a little bit kind of the same theory with bike-share. People are much more likely to use the system and use it regularly, if it's a really minimal walk from their home to the next station or their office or their favorite coffee shop.

So we do need to increase that density, but we're working on it. We are sort of parented by B-Cycle LLC which again is owned by Trek Bicycles. Part of the secret of B-Cycle success is that they are installing systems on-time and on-budget and they work like they're supposed to right out of the gates. That's one of the biggest predictors of success long-term for a bike-share system.

Does it just work the way that you described it to us? If the answer is yes, then you're going to have a good system going. With B-Cycle there's over 600 stations and 6,000 bikes on the ground between all of our systems. In North and South America we get the distinction of saying we covered two continents, thanks to our Bike Santiago Program in Santiago, Chile.

Hooray! You can start to be part of that larger network of B-Cycle stations if you're a member of Madison B-Cycle. Members do enjoy reciprocity through the B-Connected system with other cities like Denver, Fort Worth, San Antonio, your Madison card will work in their system. That's about 20 cities right now and counting.

As to any time a new B-Cycle city comes online, as long as their membership structure works fairly similarly to Madison's, you'll get that B-Connected benefit. We also set up virtual kiosks for special events or community needs. Basically that means that instead of using that physical station, we'll use staff and a computer to check bicycles in and out. So if there's not a station at a location where a lot of people are going to be collected for a concert or some other event, we can make a virtual station happen really easily.

So quick peek at the future, again here's our existing Madison B-Cycle system. This is B-Cycle Version 2.0. These are bikes that were debuted in the Indigo system in Philadelphia. If you haven't ridden, please go to Philadelphia and ride.

Indigo really quickly out of the gates. We were so proud in Madison to break 100,000 trips last year. They're way ahead of us already. And you can see slightly different geometry to the bike, a slightly smaller cargo basket up front, and then a little cargo space.

It's hard to see, but on that other side of the wheel well. Here's another 2.0 or Indigo station in Philadelphia. We see the SoBi or social bikes used in combination with your smart phone and the bike itself with a keypad that can be solar powered and locked up at several locations. And who really knows what'll be coming in the future.

Maybe you can just swipe your card at a bike and have it to ride. So here's another look at our B-Cycle 2.0 station and I picked up, looking at the white bicycle plan. Again, I talked about that being sort of a political movement. The Provo movement was sort of an anarchist movement and I like this quote even though I hope it doesn't offend too many people.

But the Provo manifesto tells us "The White Bicycle Plan proposes to create bicycles for public use that cannot be locked. The white bicycle symbolizes simplicity and healthy living as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian automobile."

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So if we paraphrase just slightly, look at what we get. We get creating bicycles for public use, simplicity and healthy living. That's something that was really a key part of the initial first generations of bike-share both in theory and in practice and it's something that really continues to guide us today and I'm sure tomorrow as well. For me in the work that I do bike-sharing really is bikes for the people.

It's healthy and green transportation, it's a community building tool, it's a simple solution, the bike is such a simple solution to many complex problems that we look at as communities, states and countries today. It really is part of a transformation in transportation and over and above everything else it's fun, it's fun to ride a bike. If it wasn't, people wouldn't do it as much as they do. So I encourage you to ride a B-Cycle if you haven't or just your own personal bike.

So, thank you. Oh, I forgot one thing, do the bikes ever get stolen? You can see through our construction and security that they really don't and again, especially in the Madison program with Madison B-Cycle, we have ambassadors and each and every one of you out there in the community who kind of keep a careful watchful eye on our bikes. This is not the most fun thing to steal and ride around for fun and then not have anything to do with it at the end.

So we've had little hiccups here and there as we've, you know, grown in our five years of existence, but theft and bike disappearance hasn't been one of them, so I'm happy to report. So thank you so much for your time and attention today and it's been a pleasure talking to you about bike-share.

applause